BLOOMFIELD — A audit firm representative shared several findings with the Bloomfield Board of Education members Tuesday night pointing to several areas of concern, including issues with payroll, inventory control for sales and nepotism with hiring.

Superintendent Joe Rasor said the Bloomfield School District had been award of several issues brought up by Terri Ogle, partner at the audit firm Keystone Accounting, during her presentation at the board meeting.

"When we did the audit, the agency's people uncovered some irregularities and we started digging into them," Rasor said.

Seven findings were outlined by Ogle, with two of them described as material weaknesses, covering the lack of documentation on payroll produced by the Athletic Department and lack of inventory controls in place to track the sales at the athletic store and the concession stand operations at Bloomfield High School and Mesa Alta Junior High.

"A time document was produced from the athletic department, requesting payment for game workers, including people not on game schedule," Director of finance and operations Gary Giron said. "Arbitrary amounts were filed for reimbursement and the schedule indicated one person was reimbursed for different games, happening at the same time.

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Other areas of concern brought up by Ogle included untimely payment of game workers who were not paid as part of regular payroll, tracking of in-kind donations made, lack of timely monitoring of budget line and issues with tax form 1099 not being issued.

Rasor said most of the irregularities came from the athletic department, as was prompted from a Title IX review conducted prior to the audit. This process has been in progress for the last 16 months, according to Director of Curriculum and Assessment Chuck Culpepper.

"it started out primarily as a Title IX pre-audit internally before we rolled into this year's audit," Culpepper said. "We tried to be real proactive, as we found issues, we tried to correct them before the actually showed up in the audit. The bulk of what was seen, was cleaned up before the auditor started in July or August."

Rasor said the school district has been working with the state on every issue found in the audit, with systems in place to correct most of the issues described.

"The state had a bunch of issues, we are trying to do everything correctly," Rasor said. "They asked a lot of questions of a lot of people and we didn't hold anything back."

For sales out of the athletic store and concession stands, a point of sale system was established with every item sold containing a bar code for inventory management.

Hiring practices for game workers was moved to the Human Resources department with a process in place to make sure all hiring in identified areas is handled fairly.

"We don't like the findings but we made sure the corrections are in place," Rasor said.